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Jeb Bush’s campaign insists it is not imploding before primary voters’ eyes despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

The former Florida governor now finds himself in a situation where his own supporters say he isn’t firing on all cylinders, his polls are sagging, Republican insiders claim he is running out of cash, and key endorsements are going to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

And now campaign officials and a top fundraiser are pushing back aggressively against claims the Bush campaign will stop paying staff on Saturday due to lack of funds.

Citing “sources close to the Bush campaign,” conservative commentator and Red State editor Erick Erickson wrote that there was a phone call on Wednesday night in which the news leaked out that the Bush campaign was out of cash.

“Pay for campaign staff will end on Saturday. The campaign is all but over,” Erickson wrote Thursday at the Resurgent. “Additionally, after having hundreds of millions of dollars on hand, the Bush Super PAC has less than $15 million from what I am being told.”

Erikson said Bush could be a “king-maker” if he got out of the race before South Carolina’s primary voters head to the polls on Saturday, but the campaign “vehemently” denied having cash-flow problems.

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After Erickson’s story reverberated through the political world on Thursday morning, Bush campaign spokesman Tim Miller tweeted:

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“I am traveling on Saturday to Nevada to help oversee that effort, and we have staff waiting for me,” Al Cardenas, a longtime Bush insider and senior fundraiser, said in a telephone interview with The Hill. “And nobody’s been notified about this information.

“It would come as a surprise to [Bush campaign] staff that Erick’s been notified ahead of them.”

And a source familiar with Bush fundraising and the campaign told The Hill the story was “complete bullshit.”

“F—ing Marco Rubio got a third place in Iowa and a fifth place in New Hampshire, and he’s trying to drive us out of the campaign. It’s ludicrous,” the source said.

“It’s a f—ing civil war [with Rubio], that’s what it is… Jeb Bush is a proud dude… We are not going to announce to the world that the campaign will finish on Saturday.”

Rumors that Bush’s campaign is about to be pulled off life-support coincide with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s endorsement of Rubio and a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll released Thursday showing Bush capturing just 4 percent of the primary vote.

“It’s all been decided, apparently,” Bush sarcastically said at a campaign stop in South Carolina on Wednesday. “The pundits have made it all – it’s all decided. We don’t have to go vote, I guess. It’s all finished. I should just stop campaigning, maybe, huh? It’s all done.”

Bush’s supporters, however, seemed worried.

Edward Scott, 58, who lives in Maryland but works in South Carolina, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Bush seems to have been “knocked off center” by his opponents’ attacks. He told the paper it was important for the former Florida governor to “raise the bar” and “be beyond the bullying.”

“I think [Trump] is getting you off your message, your good message,” added David Villinger, 62, of Ridgeville.

Bush told the Summersville audience he was “disappointed” that Haley endorsed Rubio, but vowed “a role for her in the campaign” if he wins the Republican nomination.

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Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush praised former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg today, calling him a “good man” and a “patriot.”

During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper this morning, Bush was asked what he thought of the news that Bloomberg was considering entering the 2016 presidential race.

“Mike Bloomberg is a good man,” Bush said. “We disagree on a whole lot of things, but he’s a good person and he’s a patriot and wants the best for the country.”

When asked if he would consider supporting Bloomberg if Trump was the nominee, Bush said it was “not going to happen.”

The controversial liberal mayor has spent millions of dollars promoting gun control, and has proposed many nanny state provisions in New York City, such as banning sodas over 16 ounces, reducing sodium levels in food, banning trans-fats, and even to ban loud headphones.

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After an abysmal presidential campaign in which he struggled to get over zero percent in any poll, Senator Lindsey Graham (RINO-SC) has thrown his support to another struggling establishment RINO squish, Jeb Bush.

Standing alongside Bush at a joint press conference on Friday morning, Graham made that hilarious proclamation that “the only way you can become Commander-in-Chief in America is for the American people to pick you through voting.”

Thank you for that, Goober. That’s a real stunner. We had no idea.

The funny thing is, Jeb actually thinks Lindsey Graham’s endorsement is going to help him. It shouldn’t be too surprising that Graham would support Bush, considering they are both for Common Core and amnesty for illegal aliens..

It’s been so much fun watching the spoiled little rich kid stumbling around the country, gut shot, spending record sums of money to drop further and further behind in every poll in every state, whining about this or that and all the “really cool things” he could be doing if he just didn’t have to run for president.

Juan Ellis Bush makes everybody feel good about themselves. If your last name is Hearst and you own Ch. 9 in Manchester – how much has he squandered so far on your TV station, $10 million, $12 million? And the primary is still almost seven weeks away!

For every million bucks the Bush super PAC spends, he drops another 1 percent in the polls. It’s like clockwork. Juan’s political action committee is called “Right to Rise.” It should be renamed, “Free to Fall.”

But TV stations aren’t the only businesses padding their bottom lines with Richie Rich’s billionaire bucks. If you own a restaurant in New Hampshire – the Bush people tell you they’ll need a buffet for 200 people, but you know you only have to lay out food for 20, or maybe only 5 if Donald Trump is anywhere within two counties.

If you’re feeling sorry for yourself, just watch one of Jeb’s 30-second spots. He’s got the support of “27 admirals and generals.” Wow! Now he’s walking the factory floor wearing his white coat, barking out orders and looking important – who hasn’t run into Daddy’s Little Boy pretending to be a big shot, yelling at the hired hands?

And now this Daddy’s Little Boy is getting his comeuppance.

One of last month’s campaign slogans was “Jeb Can Fix It.” Remember that one? It lasted about a week. Fix it? Fix what exactly? Apparently that was another old saying Juan Ellis Bush forgot: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Plus, should anyone named Bush ever use the word “fix?” Do you really want to remind everyone of the perception that the Bush family once “fixed” an election, in Florida?

Now he calls Donald Trump a “jerk.” Huh? Again, he’s breaking more basic rules of politics – first, never mention your opponent by name unless he attacks you. And second, never get into a you-know-what match with a skunk, because it doesn’t matter who started it, the only thing the viewers at home will remember is two you-know-whats yelling at each other.

Then there was the time he said you have to lose the primaries to win the general election. It made no sense. So now he says he “hated” being the front-runner.

“I feel so much better back here,” Bush said, from way back in fifth, or sixth, or seventh place, depending on which state you’re talking about.

Last weekend, Juan vowed to stay in the fight to New Hampshire and beyond.

“I want to show who I am,” he said on CBS.

Don’t worry, Juan, you already have. But remember, you have to lose the primaries first. And we’ll be there for you. We share your ambition. We want you to lose.

But Clinton has a 3-point edge over Donald Trump in the poll, 46 percent to 43 percent.

Interestingly, the second tier among primary voters is also a virtual tie between Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. No other Republican candidate was able to score over 3 percent, and quite a few of them fell below 1 percent to become asterisks.

No other candidate scored high enough to be counted at 1 percent in the poll.

Tim Mallow, Qunnipiac’s assistant director described Carson’s lead over Clinton as a contest of character. “Clinton gets crushed on character issues, pounded by Carson and closely challenged by Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio,” he said.

Also noteworthy is that Carson is effectively tied with Clinton among women. Women were split 45 percent to 44 percent for Carson versus Clinton.

Conversely, Carson has a tremendous favorable rating, 49 percent to 25 percent, with a sizable 25 percent saying they haven’t heard enough about him to form an opinion. His plus-24 approval spread is the best in the field, followed by plus-14 for Rubio and plus-10 for Fiorina.

Carson’s biggest weakness, unsurprisingly, comes from voters who worry that he “does not have the right kind of experience to be President.”

That seems like a much easier problem for his campaign to address than Clinton’s baked-in honesty deficit, especially since honesty and trustworthiness were rated as the most important attributes overall. Carson also scores best among all candidates in the “cares about my needs and problems” category, which is scored as the second most important attribute this time around, and was seen as perhaps the most important in the 2012 election. Clinton is underwater on this metric as well, at 44 percent to 53 percent.

The lowest approval rating among candidates in the Q-poll was held by Jeb Bush, whose 25 percent to 58 percent score gave him a Titanic-like minus-33 rating.

Jeb Bush’s campaign slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries over the last three months as the struggling candidate’s fundraising machine slowed to a more middling pace, new campaign-finance reports indicate.

No longer able to raise unlimited sums with his super PAC, Bush hauled in $13.4 million in the third quarter of the year for his campaign. That’s more than all of his GOP rivals except Ben Carson. But Bush also spent more than many of them, leaving him with about as much money in the bank as Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz has more.

Bush’s campaign once saw its size and staff as its strength. But the newly released campaign-finance reports indicate it could be a liability if fundraising slacks further.

More than 60 Bush staffers might have had their salaries cut or their positions changed to reduce their income, compared with the second quarter of the year when Bush announced his candidacy, the campaign-finance reports show. The campaign did not want to discuss the numbers. But the pay cuts, depending on whether the salaries are divided on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, could have saved the campaign anywhere from $450,000 to nearly $900,000 per quarter, according to a POLITICO analysis of the campaign’s payroll. The cuts have ranged from the small for some staffers ($12 a week) to large reductions for four of the top campaign chiefs who each took a $75,000 pay cut.

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It looks like low-energy Jeb is going to go into energy-saving mode. So basically comatose.

That’s gotta hurt. This is exactly how the ending for Rick Perry began…

During an appearance at a Jon Huntsman “No Labels” event, a female audience member named Lauren Batchelder played the role of a female antagonist toward candidate Donald Trump.

However, Ms. Batchelder is not just an average audience member. She’s a paid political operative of the GOP and a paid staff member of Team Jeb Bush:

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Within minutes of her scripted performance at the event, the producers of CNN were quickly editing soundbites and framing a narrative. That story was pushed into the media stream within hours. CNN’s Jeanne Moos was the delivery vehicle for the a hit piece.

Here’s the CNN narrative as presented yesterday:.

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However, as previously noted, it didn’t take long to discover that Lauren Batchelder was not just an ordinary audience member, she is actually a current staffer for Senator Kelly Ayotte and also working in New Hampshire on behalf of the Jeb Bush 2016 campaign.

Batchelder’s LinkedIn profile shows she is a Jeb Bush For President 2016 staffer.

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Given Senator Ayotte’s position being pro-life, and contrasted against the framework of Ms. Batchelder’s line of questioning being completely opposite of the boss(es) she is working for, it doesn’t take long to figure out this was a planted Establishment GOPe hit job targeting Donald Trump:

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Of course, Ms Batchelder quickly began scrubbing her social media history trying to hide who she works for. Almost all of her Twitter history is now deleted, but not before much of it was able to be captured. Several other profiles remain available:

Dear @JebBush,
You should explain your thought process on the intern you planted at the #NoLabels Conference. #Fail

12:43 AM – 13 Oct 2015
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This is an embarrassing fail on behalf of the establishment GOP and in particular Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

This current fail also exemplifies how the broadcast media, specifically CNN, is willing to assist the republican cause when there is a mutual benefit to the elimination of an enemy.

However, it is also further evidence of the entire construct of the Jeb Bush alliance. There are eight candidates remaining in the race specifically to assist Jeb Bush and help him win the nomination. They are:

A vote for any of these fraud candidates will only result in a later endorsement of Jeb Bush and the transference of delegates to assist his nomination efforts. This was/is the original design of the road map created to help Jeb win in 2016. [Much More Here]

The 2016 plan is similar in many ways to how Mitt Romney was able to win the nomination in 2012. If you remove Donald Trump – Ben Carson becomes Herman Cain, Ted Cruz becomes Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush replaces Mitt Romney.

It is all by design, all of it; and the only thing standing between TEAM JEB and achieving this outcome is:

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Hence the GOPe apparatus is going to use every trick they have deployed in the past to stop Donald Trump from winning the nomination.

Also, don’t be surprised to see them use the same tactics previously deployed against Senate Candidate Chris McDaniel in Mississippi 2014. Between now and removing their fingers from the grip of power, there’s going to be a SERIOUS Political WAR !

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Almost 50 percent of Florida voters say that former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio should end their respective bids for the Republican presidential nomination, according to a new poll.

A survey from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) finds that 47 percent of voters in the Sunshine State say Bush should drop out, while 40 percent say he should stick with it.

Forty-eight percent also say Rubio should drop out, while 42 percent say the senator, who has opted to run for president instead of seeking a second term in the Senate, should not drop out of the race.

A similar survey from the polling outfit released last week found that 78 percent of Republicans in South Carolina thought Sen. Lindsey Graham should end his 2016 GOP bid.

Bush and Rubio are thought to be top contenders for the GOP nomination, but are polling in single digits nationally behind billionaire businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

In the latest poll of Florida, which holds its primaries in mid-March, Trump is supported by 28 percent of GOP primary voters, followed by Carson (17 percent), Bush (13 percent) and Rubio (10 percent).

On the Democratic side, the latest PPP poll finds continued support for front-runner Hillary Clinton, who takes 55 percent support in the state despite struggling in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Clinton is followed in Florida by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Socialist-Vt.) at 18 percent and Vice President Joe Biden, who is still considering jumping into the presidential race, at 17 percent.

Trump and Clinton’s front-runner statuses were also seen in a Gravis Marketing poll also released on Monday.

The PPP survey of 814 Florida voters was conducted Sept. 11 to Sept. 13 via phone and the Internet with a margin of error of 3.4 points, while the margin of error for the 377 GOP and 368 Democratic primary voters is 5.1 points.

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Ooouuuch. My sides are still aching after last week’s comical announcement by GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush that he had snagged the coveted endorsement of notorious electoral reject Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader kicked to the curb by disgusted voters in Virginia’s 2014 primary election.

Newsflash to GOP elites: Getting Cantor’s support is not like landing a prized marlin. It’s like hooking one of those hideous bottom-feeding blobfish named the world’s ugliest creature.

Inside the Beltway, The Washington Post reported, “Cantor remains well-liked and respected in the Virginia business community and among the Republican donor class in the commonwealth.”

But outside the Beltway, the failed Republican revolutionary-turned-Wall Street influence-peddler is a snortle-inducing spectacle on both sides of the political aisle.

BushCantor share the same smug condescension toward Americans who believe in strict immigration enforcement and putting American workers first. Cantor fecklessly lied to voters during the campaign season about his position(s). He showered his district with anti-illegal immigration flyers that fraudulently portrayed him as standing up to President Obama on amnesty. But on Capitol Hill, he championed the DREAM Act for illegal alien students, huge H-1B visa increases to quench Big Tech’s appetite for cheap foreign tech workers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce/AFL-CIO’s collaboration on massive immigration expansions.

While Cantor lip-synced to the limited-government tea party message, he boogied in backrooms with his pork-barrel pals. He assailed Obama’s bloated stimulus and then celebrated the high-speed rail boondoggles in his state funded by it. As a celebrated “young gun” on the right, Cantor preached fiscal responsibility, while blowing nearly $170,000 on fancy steakhouse dinners across the country in his last year in office.

Like Bush (and Gang of Eight cheerleader Sen. Marco Rubio), Cantor was the beneficiary of – and water carrier for – generous Silicon Valley and Big Business contributors. Cantor’s biggest donors included New York financial conglomerates the Blackstone Group ($65,500) and Goldman Sachs ($26,000), and California tech company Oracle ($25,000).

One outside group, the American Chemistry Council, spent a whopping $300,000 on soft-money ads to protect Cantor – an amount that exceeded Brat’s entire campaign funding.

Likewise, while Bush fashions himself a champion of the American worker, he pompously pushes the Gang of Eight amnesty as the only “adult” plan in the room. While he poses as a champion of American parents, students and “school choice,” he trashes activist moms and zealously crusades for failed Fed Ed rackets and data-mining schemes masquerading as “higher standards.” And while he stumps for the ordinary American’s “right to rise” through conservative principles, he has parlayed his political career into a multimillion-dollar collection basket from liberal special interests and corporate cronies who fund his Common Core advocacy – including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the GE Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Intel and Pearson Education.

The disgraced seven-term representative from Virginia’s affluent 7th district, who turned his back on grassroots constituents in favor of cashing in on power, now promises to work closely with Bush “as they chart a course to the White House.”

Here’s to Cantor’s success in helping Jeb navigate his same path to loserdom. Bon voyage!

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Three top Jeb Bush fundraisers abruptly parted ways with his presidential campaign on Friday, amid internal personality conflicts and questions about the strength of his candidacy, POLITICO has learned.

There are different versions of what transpired. The Florida-based fundraising consultants – Kris Money, Trey McCarley, and Debbie Alexander – have said that they voluntarily quit the campaign and were still working with Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise Super PAC. Others said the three, who worked under the same contract, were let go because they were no longer needed for the current phase of the campaign.

None of the three immediately responded to requests for comment. Bush spokesman Tim Miller would only say that “Governor Bush has the widest and deepest fundraising operation of any candidate in the field. Ann Herberger – a longtime aide with more than two decades of experience in state and national politics – will continue to lead the operation in Florida with our team in Miami.”

One source attributed the departures to personality conflicts in the campaign, some involving Bush’s finance team.

“They were glad to go. This wasn’t a shock to anybody,” said one campaign source. “There were just some personality problems. It happens when you have a big organization like this, a big campaign. Some of the national people are tough to work for.”

Alexander, Money and McCarley have deep and longstanding ties to Florida’s GOP power structure. Money is close with former House Speaker Will Weatherford, McCarley’s part of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam’s political team, and Alexander has been a member in good standing of Bush’s operation since he was governor.

“They raised a lot of money out of Florida. A lot,” said the campaign source. “So if anyone says they didn’t quit, it’s not true. They’re still working for the super PAC as well. This is not about them,” said one source. “This is about the campaign.”

Donors last week told POLITICO that they still felt good about Bush’s chances and that they weren’t worried about Bush’s recent slip from second to third place in averages of national polls. As the son and brother of former presidents, the former governor of the third-most populous state in the nation has a deep and seasoned donor base. Some said they’re less concerned with the campaign than with Jeb’s candidacy, which has so far failed to ignite Republicans.

But Bush’s fundraising pace has slowed in the late summer months. He’s likely to remain the GOP campaign’s top fundraiser, but Bush is also spending more than other candidates because he has a mammoth operation.

“Jeb has a big army, and that army needs to be fed,” said one campaign consultant familiar with the campaign’s internal numbers. “Jeb might not have a fundraiser problem. He might have a spending problem.”

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Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush attempted to clarify his remarks about “anchor babies” during a stop near the U.S. border with Mexico on Monday, saying Asian immigrants are really more of the problem.

When asked if he thought his repeated use of the term “anchor babies” – a derogatory term for children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrant parents – Bush said: “What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed where there’s organized efforts, and frankly, it’s more related to Asian people coming into our country and having children in that organized effort.”

Bush prefaced his answer with “as I said in Spanish,” and went on to rail against political correctness, saying “we need to chill out.”

Given the opportunity to get to the White House, presidential candidate Jeb Bush would fight to grant Dreamers a path to citizenship while working to fix the broken immigration system in America.

“I, as President, I would go to congress and change the law to give them not a residency but citizenship,” Bush said in Spanish during a meeting attended by this writer.

The statement was made Monday afternoon at the Palenque Grill in this border city where patrons lined up to take photographs and shake hands with Bush.

When asked about the Dreamers, Bush said he did not agree with President Barack Obama’s approach by forcing an executive action, but instead, he said he would work with the U.S. Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform.

“You have to have a much deeper strategy than just building a fence, you have to have much more coordination with local law enforcement. There has to be more focus on a virtual fence which I propose as to using GPS technology, drone technology and other things like that,” Bush said during the event.

Prior to arriving at the local restaurant, Bush met with local officials to speak about border security issues in the area. This area, as previously reported by Breitbart Texas, has been the epicenter of an immigration crisis where hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America have arrived to the area turning themselves in to authorities in order to be released with a notice to appear in court.

“Border Patrol needs to act on a strategy and stick with it,” Bush said. “There’s too much politicizing. They do good work, but there’s too much influence form Washington DC to be effective.”

During the appearance, Bush was asked about Donald Trump’s call for a border wall and about the immigration proposals put forth by the current presidential frontrunner.

“His plans are not grounded in conservative principles. They will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not realistic,” Bush said. “My belief we can have a comprehensive border security strategy unique to the circumstance of each part of this region.”

Multiple Spanish news outlets and CNN called out Bush for his use of the term “anchor babies” to which he said he would not apologize because he was referring to a fraudulent practice used by certain people “primarily Asian” looking to take advantage of the laws.

“Everybody needs to chill out,” the candidate told the angry news outlets stating that there was too much political correctness and that was hurting any healthy debates.